You've probably picked up this book because you are a designer, whether by profession or by inclination. Design is, arguably, something that every person in the world does—laying out the text in a school report, decorating a living room, and arranging plants in a garden are all acts of creation that can have both utilitarian and aesthetic value. However, most such acts consider a small set of idiosyncratic needs: the habits and preferences of an individual, or perhaps of the handful of individuals who make up a household.
Professional designers must define financially viable products, services, and environments that meet the practical, physical, cognitive, and emotional needs of a wide range of people.
Design as a profession—by which I mean everything from product design to architecture—exists to provide both utilitarian and aesthetic value on a large scale. Professional designers must define financially viable products, services, and environments that meet the practical, physical, cognitive, and emotional needs of a wide range of people. Like someone deciding what color to paint the living room, a professional designer can—and, to some extent, does—try something, decide that it doesn't work, and try something else. Yet designers must try, fail, and eventually succeed on a deadline, within a budget, and over and over again. Eventually, all experienced designers develop a set of implicit or explicit techniques to help them do just that, and to do it better and faster over time. This book aims to share a set of explicit process and practices that have worked for many designers over the course of hundreds of diverse projects; in other words, a method. An effective method, along with appropriate training and aptitude, is what distinguishes professional designers from anyone else who may perform individual, instinctive acts of design.
This book offers an explicit, start-to-finish method for defining and designing the form and behavior of processes, services, and artifacts in our increasingly complex digital age. Some designers are hungry for an explicit method, while others may bristle at the thought, expecting that it will limit their creativity. However, there's nothing inherently good about chaotic or ad hoc approaches. The method described in these pages is not intended as a set of constraints or as a recipe to be unthinkingly followed in every situation; no method should be followed by rote.
Instead, think of the method as something akin to the harness and wire used in martial arts movies: simultaneously providing support, safety, and a powerful boost, but useless without the skill, creativity, and judgment of the practitioner. Or if that analogy doesn't work for you, how about this one: the designer's creative spark is the electricity, and the method is the power grid that channels it where it can do the most good.
Certainly, good design can happen without an explicit method. However, in the words of Louis Pasteur, "Fortune favors the prepared mind."
Why does a designer's creative spark need to be channeled? Certainly, good design can happen without an explicit method. However, in the words of Louis Pasteur, "Fortune favors the prepared mind." Without the scientific method to structure his thinking, an accident with a spoiled culture would not have led him to the germ theory of disease (and yet the method alone didn't do the trick).
Design and science have something else in common: in each field, ideas are be subject to examination and judgment by others. If you have a method that explains how you got from point A to point B, people are more likely to judge in your favor than if you say, "Trust me—I'm a professional." I expect you'll find the methods in these pages useful if you've ever:
Had to argue with a powerful CEO about why his personal preferences shouldn't drive the design
Been uncertain whether design option A or B is better
Had a group of hard-core engineers smell blood in the water when you used "because it looks cool" as a defense
Had stakeholders repeatedly change their minds about what the product is
Needed to convince stakeholders that no, really, people don't use your product that way
Had a design meeting that resembled a rugby match
Come up with a cool design concept that turned out to be unworkable a few weeks later
Wondered how you could possibly learn enough about neurosurgery, stock portfolio management, or chemistry to design a product around it
Had your design bomb a usability test
Stared at a blank whiteboard, uncertain where to begin
Both as a consultant and as an in-house creative director, I've been in most of these situations, and I've observed other designers struggle with these and other challenges. An effective method removes much of the worry in these situations so you can instead focus on doing what designers do best: generating usable, desirable solutions.
Of course, no method is perfect, and no method should be engraved in stone. The methods in this book have evolved over the years and will continue to do so as designers try new things and share the successful ones as best practices—one reason I'll be sharing my latest experiences and resources (including materials to use for some of the exercises) at www.designingforthedigitalage.com; I hope you'll share your own experiences, too. However, I'll offer you the same suggestion I share with new hires at Cooper: try the techniques as described over the course of several projects so you can master them before you carve a new trail through the underbrush. You'll probably find that the core methods address a wider variety of situations than you expect and afford all the flexibility you could need.
Every designer has the power to improve or even preserve life for some segment of humanity. Unfortunately, even the best designers can't design everything, and good designers are in limited supply. I also know plenty of potentially great designers who simply don't have the tools they need to make sure their designs see the light of day. This is especially true in our current digital age, when many design problems require the application of multiple disciplines, including interaction design, visual and information design, information architecture, industrial design, and more. Users have only one experience of a product or service, though, so this book attempts to include the perspectives and activities of all of these disciplines. (However, given that industrial design and graphic design make use of long-standing, well-understood methods, I have not attempted to address those disciplines in the broad sense, but only as they relate to interactive products and services.)
Although I love the ability to influence lives through doing meaningful design, I learned long ago that I can influence even more lives by helping other designers be more effective. My aim with this book is to help as many designers as possible make a difference in the world. Because designers cover a wide range of experience and skills, experienced designers may find that some parts of the content (particularly Chapters 15, 17, and 21) are merely useful refreshers. However, each chapter of the book includes content that I hope will:
Help experienced designers be both rigorous and persuasive in their practice, to ensure not only that they're doing great design, but that their design gets built
Give designers from different disciplines a shared framework for collaborating on today's increasingly complex products, which often combine software, hardware, services, and environments
Help design students understand not only a coherent design process, but also the essential practices—from collaboration and project management to leading stakeholder discussions—that make real projects successful
Show consulting designers how to engage with clients for the long term
Help in-house designers see how consulting practices can make them more effective
Design is not—and never will be—a science. It will also never be a cookie-cutter process that anyone can do with an appropriate checklist in hand—the method doesn't make the design, the designer does. This book cannot give you the imagination and aptitude for visualization, nor can it give you the judgment and mastery of craft that only come with experience. However, I hope what you'll take from this book will help you more reliably design the right product or service, design it well, and get the design out into the world where it can improve the quality of human lives.